Kathleen Cruz Gutierrez. Unmaking Botany: Science and Vernacular Knowledge in the Colonial Philippines. Durham: Duke University Press, 2025.

Botany offers a compelling and interdisciplinary rethink ing of the history of science in the Philippines.Rather than treating botany as a one-way impo sition of imperial knowledge, the book foregrounds the coproduction and friction between colonial science and local epistemologies.In standard botanical usage, the "vernacular" refers to local plant names (as opposed to Latin scientific nomenclature).Gutierrez redefines and broadens this notion of the vernacular, encompassing embodied, cosmological, artistic, and var ied taxonomic practices-from the culinary (rice flavors) to the artistic (folk songs for flowers) and the material (weaving skirts from abac fiber).By illuminating these lived ways of knowing plants, she exposes the philosophical and practical limits of Western botany when confronted with tropical biodiversity and local classification systems.Gutierrez introduces her book as being not merely about imperial rivalries but about recovering the social and political dynamics of the Philippines from the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth century through the lens of colonial botany.While European agents formally introduced the science, its trajectory was deeply shaped by Philippine-born field assistants, artisans, illustrators, and intellectuals, whose embodied knowledge predated, coexisted with, and transformed under colonial rule.Plants were not simply scientific specimens but consti tuted political aspirations and vernacular systems of understanding the environment.Within this framework, Gutierrez introduces the concept of "sovereign vernaculars" (pp.202122, where local insights about plants both contributed to the foundations of botany and qui etly subverted it.These vernaculars, while often co-opted or rebranded, shaped how colonial science unfolded on the ground.Gutierrez traces how plants became entangled in forms of eco logical intimacy.She argues that Philippine flora was as much about visual, linguistic, and affec tive contestation as it was about systematics, and she situates this process across both Spanish